Every time I’m angry, I prove sadly unaware of how odious my own faults are.
Seen these bumper stickers?
Recently, Pastor Sam sagaciously noted that if you are outraged, you’re not paying attention.
Something to think about.
22 Words
Exercises in getting to the point (or avoiding it) by saying what I have to say in twenty-two words, not counting titles.Archive for Quotes
Standardized spelling isn’t so much linguistically important as it is socially expected.
Should an inability to spell… mark a person as being uneducated? Or is the ability to spell a trivial accomplishment after all?
-Ronald Wardhaugh, Proper English, 13
The most effective way to negate something is to actively affirm its opposite.
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out… where the doer of deeds could have done better.
People will want to read whatever you tell them not to, so…
If [you’re] annoyed that someone out there is reading a book [you] don’t like, then here’s a suggestion: Write a better book.
Oh, that my being stupid could eventually work for my benefit! But, alas.
One’s intelligence can be so low that one is stupid, but one’s stupidity can never get high enough to make one intelligent.
-Edward Sapir, Quoted in Far from the Madding Gerund, 98
Don’t study what you haven’t taken pleasure in first.
Properly, you analyze to enjoy, but it is equally true that to analyze with any discrimination, you have to have enjoyed already.
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 108
Would Anyone Miss You?
The problem with fitting in and being a cog in the machine is that cogs are intentionally designed to be easily replaceable.
“Americans, when they are doing things, never seem really to be doing them.”
D. H. Lawrence:
[Americans] are always busy “about” something. But truly immersed in doing something, with… deep blood-consciousness active…they never are.
Maybe this has something to do with why Jesus often answered questions obtusely.
[Asking an author] “What did you mean by this book?” is to invite bafflement: the book itself is what the writer means.
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 45
When people insist on “good grammar,” why is that grammar always their dialect?
Liberman on “correct grammar”:
Many people believe that stipulation of shared linguistic norms is essential to communication…. [T]his idea is transparent nonsense.
When arguing, it’s better to be convincible than invincible.
To revise and correct [yourself, and] to forsake an unjust argument in the…heat of dispute, are rare, great, and philosophical qualities.
Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children“
We can only talk or think about God from the perspective of our humanness.
To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience.
-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 19
Why are poems, stories, songs, well-told jokes, and trenchant quotes so fulfilling to find?
The compassion innate in having someone—however remote—verbalize your despair or lend a form to it can salve the jibbering psyche.
Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome, 74
Preserving the (lexical) purity of trysts: They’re not for tramps.
On the way to a tryst, two hearts should be going pitter-patter with romantic desire and excitement … no thousand bucks changes hands.
I suppose O’Connor wouldn’t think much of blogging, then.
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.
-Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 84
The addictive respite of delusion
When someone is suffering … asking him to be undeluded by momentary uplifting, however dubious its rationale, is asking an awful lot.
-Philip Roth, American Pastoral, 125
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